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Overview

Avency is a B2B digital services provider based in Telgte, Germany. The company is an independent ISP with more than 20 years of experience in providing online and various datacenter services. Avency provides domain, mail, hosted security and cloud services and builds and designs online applications.

Avency currently hosts more than 1,200 websites/applications and 7,000 domains for a wide range of businesses including retail, social media, manufacturing, and nance. Avency’s focus on data center security is a key differentiator from other hosting companies.

Challenge

As IT director for Avency, Hendrik Walter is also Forcepoint’s first Accredited Channel Engineer (ACE) for NGFW in Germany. Walter and his team made a large investment in a proprietary ISP system that makes it completely independent and autonomous. Naturally, high availability and security were large concerns, particularly with regard to intrusion prevention and data loss prevention. To meet its ongoing security requirements, the company decided to migrate its data center from Check Point to a more suitable solution.

Solution

“After an extensive market evaluation, we realized that Forcepoint NGFW would offer superior performance, evasion protection, and cost benefits. Forcepoint is the only solution that offers mature multitenant capabilities. Plus, it offers a lower total cost of ownership since the SMC license includes built-in features that competitors lack.”
— Hendrik Walter, IT Director, Avency

Protected by Forcepoint NGFW, Avency offers several levels of security-based services to its clients. The most comprehensive is Managed Firewall Services, in which customers rent their firewalls from Avency and have full access to the SMC. Through Forcepoint NGFW’s multitenancy capabilities, Avency is able to provide each client with its own secure, separate domain that is inaccessible to other clients. Customers can access the SMC to manage their own firewalls, or they can contract with Avency to provide firewall management as needed.

“With the domain management features of Forcepoint NGFW and the well-engineered role systems in SMC, the solution is multitenant in every way. With the reporting tool, clients can automatically receive weekly or monthly reports about attacks, traf c, and all other events.”
— Walter

Through Avency’s Datacenter Firewall Services, customers outsource their IT infrastructures to Avency but maintain access to their rules, policies, and logs. These capabilities are powered by the SMC’s subrule feature and Web Portal Server.

Also through the SMC’s Web Portal Server, Avency offers a Web Hosting service that enables customers to view live log data. Armed with this data, clients can troubleshoot connection/speed issues and stay informed of attacks targeting their Web applications.

Results

With the built-in exibility of Forcepoint NGFW, Avency is able to write its own signatures and correlations in order to provide a perfect t with customer use cases.

“The solution’s extremely robust log and reporting functionality, coupled with best-in-class alert and escalation management, means we can react three times faster to incidents than we could before. Also, the centralized management, API functionality, and intelligent domain/user model mean that admins and customer can work simultaneously on their own rules and elements.”
— Walter

As Avency built momentum for its in-house use of Forcepoint NGFW, customers began to take notice.

“Our clients were curious as to how we could offer these efficient and flexible security services at such a competitive price point. This prompted us to use our experience and confidence in the products to become a Forcepoint NGFW reseller.”
— Walter

Through its Forcepoint NGFW reseller services, Avency actively monitors the customer rewalls around the clock and contacts the clients when critical events occur.

“Clients pay only a fixed monthly fee. Even with only a small budget, they’re able to get best-in-class firewall protection with expert management, and without having to make a high upfront investment. Our results with Forcepoint NGFW have been extraordinary – outstanding performance, lower costs, and, most important, considerably fewer invasions. Forcepoint is the right partner with which to grow our firewall security business.”
— Walter